Flu season slowing down in Northeastern Pennsylvania

Despite concerns this flu season would reach the pandemic levels hit when the swine flu surfaced in 2009, Pennsylvania is on pace to fall well short of any records, experts said.

Across the state, the number of reported flu cases continue to decrease week-to-week, and Pennsylvania shed the "widespread" label -- meaning less than 50 percent of its regions are reporting flu activity.

"Things are starting to wind down, and it's been a pretty standard season," said Holli Senior, spokeswoman for the state Department of Health.

Known as the "swine flu" during the outbreak, the H1N1 strain accounts for 93.27 percent of the results from state laboratories this season, the state Department of Health found. But unlike the 2010-11 season, when the strain caused as many as 18,300 deaths nationwide, vaccinations covered the strain this year, she said.

"This year's vaccine matched well with the strains that were circulating, so that's why you saw the difference," Senior said. "We have already peaked."

Pennsylvania's number of lab-positive cases since the influenza season began in late September stands at 20,149, less than half the 44,308 cases reported in the 2012-13 season.

Infectious disease expert Stephen Pancoast, M.D., who treats patients at all three Scranton hospitals, said he had a number of very sick patients earlier in the season. But there haven't been any over the last two weeks, a sign the flu season is slowing down, he said."The percentage of the population who got the vaccination was still very low, but the vaccine was a good fit," he said. "It was a fairly typical year."